Responsibilities

OFFICE HOURS SPRING TERM 2012: TUESDAY 10-12 and THURSDAY 10-12.

Public Engagement Fellow

As MMU Public Engagement Fellow, I was responsible for the creation, design and management of Moss Side Stories, a multi-media public engagement project with a widening participation brief. I continue to work for greater institutional engagement with the local community, specifically local youth and am involved with a number of third stream initiatives to that end.

Programme Leader for English

As English Programme Leader I am responsible for the day to day management of the BA English programme, including the promotion of the programme at visit days and induction events, quality assurance monitoring and documentation, strategic planning, the production of student information materials relating to induction and option choice,  the timetabling of teaching, the co-ordination of student extenuating circumstances claims and of the examinations process

Teaching areas

My academic background is in film, film theory and American literary and cultural studies. I am especially interested in the politics of cinematic representation, specifically in genre cinema and the ways in which filmic and literary texts intersect with ideas of individual, collective and national identity. To that end, I teach undergraduate courses on how to read films, why we read films and how we can read films otherwise. I am engaged in the supervision of PhDs and MA dissertations in a variety of areas - from on cult cinema, film fandom and horror cinema to superheroes, serial killers and stars.  I also  teach film and gothic studies units on the MA English Studies.

Background

Brief Professional Biography

Since my arrival at MMU in 1994 (following undergraduate work at Warwick and postgraduate study at Oxford and Cambridge) I have worked in a number of capacities in the English Department, including Year One Programme Leader and Disabilities Coordinator.

Research Interests

In recent years I have worked predominantly on horror cinema, contributing a range of papers to national and international conferences in the area of film and gothic studies.  In 2008 I published The Wounds of Nations with Manchester University Press, a study of the politics of national trauma, as evinced in the post-war horror cinemas of America, Britain, Germany and Japan. I am currently working on the interface of global neo-liberalism and the post 9/11 proliferation of the gothic.

Publications

 Selected Recent Publications

Entries on Nosferatu and Hannibal Lecter, The Ashgate Encyclopaedia of Literary Monsters, Ed Jeffrey Weinstock (Ashgate Publications: Aldershot, 2012)

Entries on Friday 13^th and Halloween, The Blackwell’s Encyclopaedia of the Gothic, Ed William Hughes, David Punter and Andy Smith (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 2012)

 “Vampires, Mad Scientists and the Unquiet Dead: TV Ubiquity and the Gothic’s Own Demise,” in PopGoth: Gothic in Contemporary Popular Culture Ed. Justin D Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (Basingstoke: Routledge, 2012)

  "New Labour New Horrors: Recent British Horror Cinema and the New Labour Project." European Nightmares. Ed. Patricia Aylmer. London & Buffalo: Wallflower / Columbia University Press, 2012.

 “I am the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s work’: Rob Zombie, George Bush and the Limits of American Freedom.” American Horror after 9/11. Austen: University of Texas Press, 2011. 

 “The Dead do not Remember and Nothingness is not a Curse: Child of God and McCarthy’s Necrophiliac Modernism.” Studies In Gothic Fiction. www.zittaw.com/studiesingothicfiction.htm (November 2011)

 “Back Together Again: Traumatic Reunification in Recent German Horror Cinema.” Proceedings from the Biennial Conference of the International Gothic Association. Ed. Gilles Minegaldo. 2011

 “You guys and your cute little categories": Torchwood, The Space-Time Rift and Cardiff's Postmodern, Postcolonial and (avowedly) Pansexual Gothic.” The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies. Issue 7 (20/12/2009). http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/Torchwood.html

“William Dean Howells and the City of New York: A Hazard of New Writing.” Studies in the Literary Imagination: Scripting Urban Culture (Spring 2009)

The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, National Identity and Historical Trauma. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008.

“Forty Years On and it Still Aint Worth Saving” Popmatters: Night of the Living Dead 40th Anniversary. Edited by Marco Lanzagorta, Produced Karen Zarker and Sarah Zupko (October 2008). http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/forty-years-on-and-it-still-aint-worth-saving.

“Edgar Allan Poe in Paris: The Flaneur, the Detournement and the Gothic Spaces of the Nineteenth-Century City.” Le Gothic.  Ed. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik. Palgrave, 2008.

 ““Everyone Will Suffer” –  National Identity and the Spirit of Subaltern Vengeance in Nakata Hideo’s Ringu and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring.” Monstrous Adaptations. Ed. Jay McRoy and Richard Hand. Manchester University Press, 2007.

“Partly Truth and Partly Fiction: The Western, the City Movie and the American 1970s.” American Visual Cultures. Ed John Beck and David Holloway. New York and London: Continuum, 2005.

 “Jorg Buttgereit’s Nekromantiks: Things To Do in Germany With the Dead.” Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945. Ed. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004.

 “Another One for the Fire: George A Romero’s American Theology of the Flesh.” Shocking Cinema of the 1970s. Ed. Xavier Mendik. Intro. Michael Winner. Hereford: Noir Publishing, 2002.

“Whoever Fights Monsters: The American Serial Killer and Jackson Turner’s Final Frontier,” The Devil Himself: Villains and Villainy in American Crime Fiction and Film. Ed. Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates. Westport & London: Greenwood Press, 2002.

 "Herman Melville and the Myth of American Nature" Igitur. University of Rome Press, Spring, 2002.